Sunday, April 20, 2014

Why You'll Dig it:

THE ORIGINAL HTC
One was such a design statement that the company has opted not to mess with the formula for its successor. With an-all-metal design, faster internals and a larger screen, you could easily mistake the new hanset for the original - until you turn it over and spot the unique dual camera.

FULL METAL JACKET

As one of the few Android phones to compete with Apple in terms of design, the HTC One (m8) is a beautiful handset. It's a almost 90 per cent metal, with the few silvers of plastic used to ensure the best possible reception for the internal antennas. The curved back fits your hand comfortably and the brushed metal finish glints in the light. The m8 will also be available in gold and silver color, but these have a more subtle matte finish.

The m8 is slightly larger than the original HTC One to make room for the bigger Sin LCD display. Both phones have the same 1,920x1,080 resolution, which means pixel density has dropped from 469ppi on the 4.7in original to 441ppi here, but in practice it's still impossible to see individual pixels. The m8 looks incredibly sharp, even the tiniest of fonts is still legible, and images are incredibly detailed, with natural colors and pure bright whites, along with impressively deep blacks. With a peak brightness of 491cd/m² and an sRGB colors spectrum coverage of 93.7 per cent, the m8 is among the best LCD screens we've seen, rivalling the iPhone 5S.

HTC's front-facing BoomSound speakers make watching YouTube videos a joy; they are impressively loud, but also clear, with no signs of distortion or clipping when pushed to their limits. There's even a small amount of bass, so you won't need to reach for your headphones when someone sends you a video.

DOUBLE VISION

It's at the back where you'll find the biggest change; the Duo Camera is such an important feature that it almost deserves a review in itself. It uses dthe same 4-megapixel 'Ultrapixel' main sensor as the original HTC One, which has an oversized ½in sensor and larger 2.0um pixels to capture more light information. However, this time it's paired with a second depth-sensing camera. Used together, they let you choose the point of focus in a image even after you've pressed the shutter button, or add stylish bokeh effects to your images. Sadly, optical image stabilisation has been cut to make room for this feature.

Because it uses hardware rather than software calculations to assign depth values to images, the m8 is much faster than other smartphones. Samsung's Galaxy S5 and the LG G Pro 2 both take five shots at once then stitch them together, giving you five possible points of focus but taking several seconds per shot. With HTC we could take three or four different shots in the same amount of time. In practice, the effects make portraits and macro shots stand out, but sometimes refocusing an image would blur areas we wanted to keep in focus; there's no way to select the strength of the effect, so you're stuck with what the phone chooses for you.

If you're more of a night person, you'll love the m8's low-light abilities. Moving inside, it captured plenty of facial detail when shooting portraits; it was also quick to save each shot, which could make it the perfect nightclub companion. It also has a True Tone flash, which automatically adjusts the intensity and color of the twin LEDs to produce more accurate low-light images. In our still life tests, it helped create a more even color balance than other smartphones.

You can control white balance, ISO and shutter speed to negate some of this effect, saving your settings as a specific 'lens' that can be called up at any time. There are also a huge number of filters, effects and tools to choose from once you've taken a snap, too, including the clever Dimensionalise mode which uses the depth data to add a 3D effect, where tilting the phone moves the images online and preserve the effect, but it's a nice touch that can add a bit more interest to your photos. HTC's custom Camera app is sensibly laid out and very responsive, making it ideal for spur-of-the moment photography.

BLINKING ANDROID

As is par for the course in a 2014 flagship phone the HTC One (m8) is running latest 4.4 KitKat version of Android. The latest iteration of HTC's own Sense user interface sits on top; that means reskinned icons, a selection of device-specific apps and the Blinkfeed news reader, which is just a swipe away from the home screen. Blinkfeed is much easier to scroll through now everything is presented in one long list, rather than by pages at a time, letting you get Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google+ updates in bite-sized chunks without jumping into the apps themselves. You can also add a selection of diverse news sources, including the Guardian, Bloomberg, Designed for Living, Deadline, Autoblog and Vice.

The Phone, Messages and Mail apps have all received Sense makeovers, and HTC insists on including its own Browser app rather than let Googles's Chrome take centre stage, but otherwise this latest version of Sense is refreshingly minimal. The Settings app is cleanly laid out and easy to navigate, while the pull-down notification and quick settings menus feel a lot like vanilla Android.

HARDER WEAR

HTC has also added a microSD card slot to the HTC One (m8), letting you add up to 128GB of extra capacity to the 16GB or 32GB of internal storage (depending on the model). Unfortunately, Google's revised permissions in Android 4.4 make it a bit harder to edit or move the files saved to external storage, but anyone that uses their smartphones as an MP3 jukebox or portable video library will still appreciate its inclusion.

The m8 is powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 801 processor, which seems to have made its way into almost every flagship smartphone in 2014 so far. The quad-core chip runs at 2.3GHz and is paired with 2GB of RAM, which translates to incredibly fast performance. Even with Sense 6.0 running on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, the phone felt extremely responsive, loading apps quickly and drawing image-heavy websites such as BBC News and the Guardian with no noticeable lag or slowdown. When it comes to to web browsing, this is the fastest Android-powered smartphone.

The Adreno 330 GPU is also more than adequate for playing any game in the Google Play Store today; it played demanding 3D titles such as Real Racing 3 smoothly.

Why You'll Dig it:

Asus Transformer Book Trio TX201LA
is unlike any hybrid device we've ever seen. Not only is there a complete Windows 8 system hidden inside its keyboard, there's also an Android tablet packed in behind the screen.

Switching between operating system is simple. Detach the screen from the keyboard and you have an Android 4.2 tablet - the change takes place in an instant. You can also use the dedicated "instant OS switch" button at the top of the keyboard to switch between operating systems when the keyboard dock is attached. The transition takes less than a second and you don't need to worry about losing your progress either, as each operating system runs in the background while the other is in use, so you can pick up instantly where you left off.

You can use the keyboard and touchpad to control both operating systems, which will be welcome news to those who don't like using Android's onscreen keyboard or who want to keep oncreen fingerprints to a minimum. it certainly makes browsing the web easier if sites aren't configured for mobile viewing.

A nice feature, though, is the ability to connect the keyboard dock to a monitor over its Mini HDMI or mini DisplayPort output. As the Windows PC is inside the keyboard, you can use it on a large screen while someone else uses the tablet.

Of course, with twice as much hardware the Trio is a little bulkier than many hybrids. Its combined weight of 1.7kg (1kg for the keyboard dock and just 700g for the tablet) makes the Trio TX201LA surprisingly heavy in your hand. The tablet es actually a fraction lighter than Samsung's Galaxy NotePro 12.2 tablet, but at 9.7mm deep it's almost 2mm thicker. It's still comfortable to hold in both hands, but we often had to rest it on our lap or the edge of our desk when using it for long periods. The Trio's combined height of 32mm when closed is also considerably thicker than an Ultrabook, but it's easy enough to fit in a bag when traveling.

The Trio doesn't have the widest range of ports, but it should cater for most users. As well as two video outputs it has two USB3 ports and combined headphone and microphone jack on the keyboard dock. The tablet has a microSD card reader that supports cards up to 64GB, a Micro USB port and another combined headphone and microphone jack.

The microSD card is particularly useful as the tablet has only 16GB of internal storage. The keyboard dock, on the other hand, has a 500GB hard disk, so you'll want to store most of your files here. Transferring files between the two is easy. The tablet's storage appears as a drive in Windows Explorer, so you can drag and drop files from one to the other.

INNER STRENGTH

The Trio's dual-operating system isn't just for show - some seriously capable hardware powers each device. In the Windows-based keyboard dock you'll find a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 4GB of RAM. This is the processor found in many Core i5 Ultrabooks. It's more than capable of handling everyday office tasks and running multiple applications at once.

The tablet, meanwhile, has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560 processor and 2GB of RAM. This would be sluggish in a laptop, but it's a great choice for Android. The operating suystem felt smooth and responsive when we were flicking between pages. The tablet completed the SunSpider JavaScript test in a respectable 1,280.3ms, quicker than the Google Nexus 10, so you shouldn't have any trouble browsing the web or watching videos.

The Trio's keyboard is a joy to use. Ideally, we'd like a little more room on the wrist rest, but the keys are well spaced and give plenty of tactile feedback while typing. We like the responsive touchpad, too, and its smooth surface makes it easy to perform multi-touch and Windows 8 gestures.

BLACK LIGHT

The touchscreen disables itself when you're using Windows 8 with the keyboard dock connected. This isn't too much of a loss, though, as the screen's 1,920x1,080 resolution would be tricky to use accurately with touch support. It still works when you switch to Android in the keyboard dock, though.

SEMI SKIMMED

The Trio's rear 5 megapixel camera is less impressive, as both our indoor and outdoor shots had a kind of milky haze. Images were relatively detailed when there was enough light, but even outdoor shots in bright sun were noisy, with muddy patches of pixels.